an initial analysis of the contextual information available within auction posts on contract...
DESCRIPTION
This presentation explores the role that context can play in the detection of contract cheating. The paper looks at how context can be identified, both directly on the posts made on agency websites, and through wider observation of the contract cheating landscape and makes some initial proposals as to how intelligent software to detect contract cheating could be developed.TRANSCRIPT
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An Initial Analysis Of The Contextual Information Available Within Auction Posts On Contract
Cheating Agency WebsitesThomas Lancaster and Robert Clarke
Birmingham City UniversityICAES 2014
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Background
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The Role Of The Authors In Contract Cheating Research
Dr. Thomas Lancaster
Senior Lecturer in ComputingPhD “Effective And Efficient Plagiarism Detection”Programme Leader BSc Computer ScienceLead of Innovations in Computing Education Group
Robert Clarke
Educational ConsultantCurrent Visiting Lecturer/Former Principal Lecturer30 Years Experience Teaching At BCU19,000 Attempts at Contract Cheating Found
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“Originators” Of Contract Cheating
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/5071886.stm
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Not Turnitin
Turnitin is a text similarity detection engine, which determines when two pieces of text share commonality
Contract Cheating produces original work, so will not be detected using Turnitin
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The Role Of Context
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Can Context Help?
The paper hypothesis:
Knowing the context of a request placed online by a student looking to cheat will help to attribute the cheating student
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Two Stages Of Attribution
1. Identify from which university/academic institution an attempt at cheating has been taken from
2. Identify which individual student out of a larger cohort attempted to cheat
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Examples
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Example Of Contract Cheating (1)
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Example Of Contract Cheating (2)
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Towards Intelligent Detection
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Automated Detection
An automated system to detect contract cheating using agency sites, such as Freelancer.com, would need to scrape/automatically collect as much contextual information as possibleContext is largely used in this way by current manual detection methods (by a detective)
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Examples Of Available Context
The text of the cheating request (does this match known assignment content? does this contain institutional identifiers?)The username/history/photo/stated location of the requester (does this match information on other sites?)
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Missing Context (Can This Be Gathered?)
Copies of all assignment briefs provided worldwide, in all subjectsFull profiles of all students worldwide, with identifying/characteristic information
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An Approximation Of These Databases
Suggestion, use Google to approximate the necessary searches for images, assignment information, contact informationUse Facebook for social media searches for student informationAugment this using Turnitin, which contains some assignment briefs (e.g. embedded within student uploads)
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Recommendations
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Partial Solutions
The Contract Cheating proposes multiple partial solutions:Six-Stage Contract Cheating Detection ProcessUse of StylometricsWatermarking of assignments to allow cheating
students to be identified
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The Community Role
The wider community can support Contract Cheating detection by developing fully and partially automated toolsStudent and research projects have a role to play here
Embedding the use of contextual information within these tools should aid in the detective process
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Continued Awareness
There are still academics who are unaware that students can cheat, or who seem tempted to “turn a blind eye”Changes to pedagogy and to staff attitudes are needed to continue to preserve the value of academic qualifications
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More Information
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For More Information
Thomas Lancaster:http://[email protected]
Robert Clarke:[email protected]
Slides Available At:http://slideshare.net/ThomasLancasterVideo Discussion Available At:http://youtube.com/DrThomasLancaster
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Discussion
How can context for contract cheating on agency sites be automatically gathered?
Can existing systems be used to augment automatically gathered contextual information?
What algorithmic techniques are most suited for the detection of contract cheating?